


Developments

by orphan_account



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: i added the archive warnings just to be safe but nothing is particularly graphic, it just exists, this fic is neither pro nor anti her relationship with melchior, wendla's internal monologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 12:44:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19376962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Wendla fascinates me. I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully capture her magnitude in words, but here's my best shot. Reflections on girlhood and growing up.





	Developments

Wendla inspected her body in the mirror every evening. The ritual had started after the discovery of her breast buds, two small foreign objects that had appeared out of nowhere shortly after her tenth birthday. They had felt like little buttons, inflexible and circular, burrowed down under her skin. She had stood there, stripped of all undergarments, poking and prodding with delicate fingers. She was so skinny, then. Her mother informed her that she was “developing”. Developing what, exactly? Every night, she checked for new developments. Bodies change very slowly, she came to learn. Wendla had seen naked bodies before. When she had been tiny, her mother occasionally bathed with her. Her breasts were large, with tan areolas like tea saucers, and hung low enough to rest upon her stomach when she sat down in the tub. And of course, she had shared a bedroom with Ina until she got married. They had an age difference of eight years, so Wendla was eleven when Ina was nineteen. Wendla liked to watch her get dressed in the mornings, fascinated by all the layers and bustles and clasps and ribbons. It seemed so overcomplicated. Wendla was content with her simple drawers and frock, frustrated enough by the garters that held up her socks. It was a bit like a performance, Wendla thought, like Ina was getting dressed up to perform a play about being a young Lutheran woman at the dawn of the 20th century instead of just being one. Wendla sometimes wondered where Ina had found the script. Because Ina was good at living, it seemed to her. She was good at meeting Mama’s expectations and good at feeling satisfied by the life set out in front of her. Now, Wendla was wondering what “living” really meant. She wondered this after returning home the evening of her… _experience_ with Melchior. What other word was there for it? 

Wendla stared at herself in the mirror, tracing her hands where his had been. To her surprise, she didn’t look any different. No new developments. Or were there? She stepped closer. On the side of her neck, just below the edge of where her collar would normally lay, was a little red-purple mark. There were a few more scattered across the tops of her breasts (which were not as large as Mama’s, but enough to fill the palms of Melchi’s hands), but the one on her neck was the most vivid. Wendla remembered the feeling of Melchior’s mouth on her skin, hot and wet and clumsy. She pressed a finger to the mark. It was a little bit sore. She pressed harder. It ached like a bruise. Then Wendla pressed her lips together, a hint of a smile. 

Today had been a day of revelations. Her body had felt things she hadn’t previously known to exist. Who knew that another tongue beside her own wasn’t gross, but rather a slippery sort of exciting? Who knew that feeling teeth just barely scrape against her nipple could create a warm and tingly kind of weightlessness inside her belly? Who knew her spine could arch off the ground without her having to think about it, who knew that her throat could make such guttural and desperate sounds totally out of her control? Who knew that a man could fit a whole piece of himself between her legs, and rock it back and forth until he was satisfied? Was it supposed to have stung like that? 

“Melchi, you’re hurting me,” she had whimpered. 

“Shh, Wendla, it’ll pass,” Melchior had spoken into the place where her neck met her shoulder, eyes scrunched up shut in what looked like concentration. He was right, as he often was. She was then able to focus on the insanity that was having another entire human body pressed flush against her own. She always forgot what bodies felt like on other people, what they felt like from the outside. She didn’t hug many people. They were so firm, yet so… squishy, so much softer than they were in her memory. And so, so warm. She was then shocked by the realization that her own body was probably just as warm, and then she got wrapped up in a spiral of thoughts about how every person had as complex of a mind as she did, and how every person contained their own little version of life. Except each brain had only seen a certain amount of things, but surely there were enough people for all of the world’s things to have been seen and heard by at least one person, and so if every person’s brains were connected you could know the entire world, and maybe then the entire universe. 

“Melchi,” she had whispered, caught up in her spiral. “We can know the entire universe.” 

“Yes, Wendla, anything,” he had replied, out of breath, and not all the way paying attention. 

And so maybe living was feeling feelings, waiting for the next time you could feel them and looking for people you could feel them with. And pain was a feeling, and weightless was a feeling, and warm was a feeling, and crying was a feeling, and laughter was a feeling. Empty was not a feeling. Empty was the absence of feeling. And absence of feeling is what Wendla felt as she looked at herself in the mirror. Her chest ached with numbness, so different from the fluttering, dry-mouthed anxiousness she had endured on the walk to Melchi’s barn merely hours ago. Numb, numb, numb. Wendla didn’t like numb. Numb wasn’t living. She pressed her finger into the bruise again, and stared.


End file.
